I'm a replacement child

When Maria Lawson's older sister burned to death aged four, her mother was told by the family doctor to have another child. Which is how Maria came to be born, and – unbelievably – christened with the same name as her dead sibling

Maria Lawson: 'My mother told me: "God has taken away my angel and given me a devil in her place."' Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

During a game of hide-and-seek when she was five, Maria Lawson came across a box of brand new toys in the back of her mother's wardrobe. Inside was a wooden train painted bright red and yellow, and a striped spinning top, as pristine as the day they were bought.

As much as she would have loved to play with them, the little girl knew to put them back in the box, and never said a word to anyone.

Maria says: "I already knew who the toys belonged to: the 'other' Maria. My big sister with the same name who burned to death before I was born. She'd been given them at Christmas, a few days before she died at the age of four. A spark from the fire in our front room set fire to her nightdress as she played with the new toys and she was burned alive. I was born to be her substitute."

Today, Maria is a stylish, gregarious woman of 56, who runs her own interior design company in Halifax, West Yorkshire.

But her life has been defined – and overshadowed – by that single spark that flew out of the flames two years before she was born in 1955.

Maria was born as a "replacement child" – the term used for those conceived by parents to fill the void left by an elder child who dies. As if she could seamlessly slip into the shoes of her dead sister, Maria was even given the same name as the sibling who was lost. But instead of being a salve for her mother Nina's suffering, her existence instead seemed to be a daily torment.

In turn, it has left Maria with profound feelings of worthlessness, which have blighted her life ever since and resulted in three shattered marriages, and difficult relationships with her own children.

"I was called Maria – but it was made clear to me very early on that I could not live up to the first Maria, who was an angel in every way. I was told she was the perfect child with blond curls, who was brave and fearless and always did exactly what she was told.

"I was the dark one – with brown eyes and dark hair. I was a quiet, shy, reclusive child. Yet still my mother told me: 'God has taken away my angel and given me a devil in her place.'"

Looking back now, such cruelty seems almost incomprehensible. But as Maria now acknowledges, the tragedy happened in a very different era. Postwar Britain was a country where many had suffered personal losses, and the expectation was that everyone just got on with it.

There were other reasons that her mother Nina never recovered from her daughter's death. The stylish daughter of a wealthy Catholic family, she met her husband, Cyril, a sailor with the British navy, when he had pulled into port near her home in southern Italy at the end of the war.

Although they fell in love, she later claimed she had been lured to Britain by promises of a grand mansion with "swans swimming on the lake". Instead, she arrived to find her new home was a council terrace in Manchester.

Trapped in the marriage by her strict Catholic faith and unable to bear the shame of returning to her family, she stayed – but she made no secret of her resentment of her situation.

Introspective and intense, she was also a woman who made few friends. She never really mastered English, always speaking in heavily accented Italian, which made her hard to understand.

When the first Maria died, aged four, Nina had just given birth to her fourth child, John. She also already had two twin girls, Elsa and Margaret, six.

Much of what the surviving Maria knows about that cold January morning is what she learned through fragmented conversations over the years. It was rarely discussed in the family. Even now she says her twin sisters, aged 65, still cry when they talk about it.

"From what I know, my father had just lit the fire in the front room before he went to work," she says.

"My mother was upstairs feeding the newborn baby while the girls played with their Christmas toys. Maria was playing in the middle of Elsa and Margaret and there was no fire guard. A spark landed on Maria's nightdress.

"In those days, nighties weren't fire-retardant and hers went up in flames. My sisters were in mute shock and just didn't know what to do. When they started screaming for my mother to come downstairs, she didn't believe them.

"Maria managed to crawl in flames to the bottom of the stairs. When my mother did come down, she found Maria's charred body, on the bottom step."

Nina tried to put out the rest of the flames with her bare hands before running out on to the street. "But in those days people didn't have phones so it took about half an hour for the ambulance to come. By the time the crew arrived, she was repeatedly beating her head against the wall."

Covered with 95% burns, Maria later died in hospital, and so began a lifetime of blame and recrimination.

The twins were sent away. Every day for the first few months after the funeral, Nina would go to the Southern Cemetery in Manchester and sit by the grave as she rocked her son's pram. Often she would stay until the cemetery keeper told her he was closing up.

But her grief never lifted. Maria says: "My mother blamed everyone: My father for not putting the fire guard up and my sisters for not doing enough to save her, even though they were only six."

In those days, it was common practice for doctors to tell families who had lost children to have another baby as quickly as possible. When Nina went to her GP and was told having another child was the best way she could recover, she took his advice and got pregnant.

But it meant that even before her birth, Maria was required to step into a role that no one should ever be asked to fill. As a child, her earliest memories were that she was not good enough.

Looking back, Maria now believes that her mother's guilt that she could not save her little girl tortured her so much that "attack was her only form of defence".

"I was no consolation to her. She even claimed my father had raped her to conceive me. We never knew why she called me the same name. You'd never dare ask. That was just the way it was and I accepted it.

"Rather than being cherished, my mother would ignore me. I can remember getting a cake for my birthday at the age of six, but other than that I can only remember one or two hugs through my childhood. I just had to accept what I was given.

"I seemed to bear the brunt of it. My sisters quickly left home and married. My brother John was put on a pedestal because he was the son of the family.

"Dad was pretty henpecked and never spoke about the other Maria. My mother was a superb dressmaker and as the years went on opened up a shop. So Dad, who was a gardener, was the one who looked after me. He woke me up in the mornings, made me toast, washed my shirts and socks."

Maria's older sister Margaret Bryant agrees that Maria bore the brunt of her mother's deep depression. "It was a very sad household. There was no music, no laughter. If you don't have a happy mother, you can't have a happy child, and Maria got the worst of it."

Every Sunday, Maria would be taken on the bus by her mother to the place where her namesake was buried to put fresh flowers there. Bewildered, she would stand back and watch as her usually emotionless mother would kneel down and sob on the grave, marked with her own name.

There Maria would gaze upon the "face of an angel": the smiling image of a four-year-old girl with golden curls, which Nina had insisted on using to embellish the tombstone.

Maria says: "Often I would hear what a wonderful little girl my dead sister was, how she never answered back, how if you told her to stay somewhere, she wouldn't move an inch. Because she was four when she died, the first Maria never had the chance to become a fully formed person who made mistakes. But of course, I had plenty of opportunity to do that."

Feeling neglected and unloved, by 15 Maria had been caught shoplifting – she says her mother told the police she did not want her back – and as soon as she could, she left home.

By 19, she had fled her unhappy home to get married and soon had twin boys – but just as her mother had, she had difficulties bonding with them. With no model of a good mother to follow, she found it hard to express love. She went on to have three failed marriages.

"Maybe it would have been better if I had been born a boy. Probably if the accident hadn't happened, I wouldn't have got married so young. I was shy and insecure and had no sense of self-worth. But then maybe if my sister hadn't died, I wouldn't have been born.

"Because I felt so unloved, I couldn't believe in love. I had no confidence with men. It's taken me all my life to get over the fact my mother did not love me for who I was but that I was born to order because someone else died."

Consultant psychologist Dr Pat Frankish has a special interest in parents' reactions to the loss of a child and says difficulties forming relationships are very common in replacement children.

She says: "There can be serious interference in the development of their identity. If replacement children are brought up as substitutes, that stops them establishing a sense of themselves as a valued person, which makes it very hard to enter into relationships where they are equally matched."

This situation is made harder by the fact that the child who dies is elevated to the status of unattainable perfection, says Frankish, which the subsequent child can never live up to. "For parents, imagining their children as an angel in heaven is a way of defending themselves against the reality of a body in a coffin."

While in the 1950s, parents were expected to get over the loss of a child, she says that it is now accepted that parents never fully recover.

It is likely that Maria's mother suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, made worse by the fact she had to wait for half an hour for an ambulance to come to her daughter's aid. Because it was not addressed, this experience then got deeply buried.

Indeed, even at 93, unable to hear and with Alzheimer's, Nina, say both daughters, still weeps over the first Maria, but remembers little else.

Margaret says: "Our mother still has her picture with a little candle next to it, like a shrine. There is room for four bodies in Maria's burial plot. To the end, our mother refused to let my father, who died from cancer, be buried there. Now she says she is looking forward to joining Maria there and seeing her in heaven."

As her mother nears the end of her life, Maria says that while she finds it hard to love her, she is closer to finding forgiveness.

"I think if she'd had counselling, we all would have stood a better chance. By giving me Maria's name, she was denying it had ever happened. But back then, you were just expected to carry on.

"It's taken me a long time to understand why she was the way she was to me. But now I understand she had just had a baby a few days before, her hormones were raging, she had no family support, or anyone she could talk to in her own language.

"I would have loved to have known Maria and had a sister nearer to my age, although who knows if I would have been born if she had lived.

"As a child, I imagined what she was like all the time. I was proud to be named after her. It made me feel closer to her. But the tragedy is that by losing a sister, I lost my mother as well."